Nintendo Switch release date, price, and games lineup to be announced on January 12

Nintendo will host a Nintendo Switch Presentation where it will share “major details” regarding the recently revealed home gaming system on January 12, 2017 (U.S. time), Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima announced during a financial presentation in Tokyo today.

The event will be for invited media, financial analysts, and trade partners in Tokyo and will be live streamed worldwide. It will include the launch date and pricing for Nintendo Switch, as well as a look at the lineup of games currently in development.

Kimishima also announced that Nintendo Switch sampling events for invited media, partners, and consumers will take place in the U.S. and Europe after the presentation at later dates. There will also be opportunities for the public to participate in other hands-on events around the same time, details of which will be announced at a later date.

The exact time of Nintendo Switch Presentation 2017 will be announced through Nintendo’s social media channels in the coming weeks.

So that means Nintendo's not exactly confident to SWITCH launch sales?

Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima has said that current financial guidance leads him to expect that 2 million units of Nintendo Switch hardware will be shipped by the end of this financial year (i.e. by March 31, the new console's launch month).

Reported by the Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki at Nintendo's financial results briefing, that number is over a million units less than the Wii U's initial 3.06 million unit shipment.

To clarify, the 3.06 million is based on Nintendo’s reported Wii U sell-through 44 days after the system launched (the sales period of November 18 to December 31) in 2012. Leading up to Wii U’s launch, the company said at the time it would ship 5.5 million units from the system’s holiday debut until the end of Nintendo’s fiscal year in March 2013.

Nintendo may have started selling Wii U during the holiday sales period, but it does not intend to do the same for Nintendo Switch. The company has made it clear that it plans to sell its new dedicated gaming hardware worldwide beginning March 2017. At the time of this article, Nintendo has not specified a launch date, but the proposed Spring launch window gives the new hybrid console a sales window of up to 31 days.

It represents what could be seen as a more cautious Nintendo, whose expectations for the Wii U were far higher than the reality to come.

It's worth bearing in mind that a shipped unit represents hardware being sent to retailers, so this doesn't necessarily mean that Nintendo expects to sell all 2 million units immediately.

Earlier today, Nintendo revised its expected sales earnings for the financial year down by 30 billion yen.